The Challenge - The Data Gap. Without good data a company cannot make good decisions. Today, every company is faced with a data gap: a gap between the amount of data being generated and the resources available to analyze it. Today, there is more and more data being generated about customers, prospects, suppliers, parts, and business processes, but fewer and fewer people qualified to analyze it.

Data Mining and Knowledge Management. Data mining and knowledge management are emerging as key technologies enabling companies to increase profits and revenues from a better understanding of their data.

Data mining is the semi-automatic extraction of patterns, statistical models, rules, changes, and anomalies from data. There is always more data to analyze than resources available to analyze it, and it only gets worse each day. Data mining is a technology to fill the "data gap" so that useful information can be extracted from data which otherwise would be ignored.

Data mining and knowledge management has four broad phases:

1. Data cleaning - cleaning, organizing and preparing data for analysis

2. Data analytics - analyzing data using techniques from statistics and data mining. This results in models and rules.
3. Deployment - integrating the models and rules produced by data analytics into operational systems so that a company can increase its revenues and profits.
4. Knowledge management - over time, it becomes more and more of a challenge to maintain, organize, and refresh the knowledge gained from data mining and other activies. Knowledgement management is concerned with making sure that knowledge gained today is available tomorrow.

Open Data. With Open Data's consulting and outsourced data services, a company can:

1. Increase profits and revenues through a better understanding of its data.

2. Exploit data to maximize shareholder value and return on IT investment.

3. Use knowledge management so that insights discoverd today are available tomorrow.

4. Target capital allocations at activities that improve the knowledge base.

Open Data's consulting and outsourced data services include:

• Explaining data mining and knowledge management to senior managers.

• Building an internal case for introducing data mining and knowledge management.

• Starting a data mining, data warehousing, or knowledge management program.

• Gaining momentum with a quick and simple success story.

• Planning, undertaking, and managing data mining and knowledge management projects.